UUMA 2015 Annual Review UUMA Annual Review Year of 2015 from the UUMA Board of Trustees
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UUMA 2015 Annual Review UUMA Annual Review Year of 2015 From the UUMA Board of Trustees The UUMA Board has had an exciting and creative year. Some might wonder what the Board actually does to benefit our Contents members, since we have delegated the programmatic work of fulfilling the mission of “nurturing excellence in ministry through Board of Trustees Report ..... 2 collegiality, continuing education and collaboration” to our Staff Report .......................... 4 awesome Executive Director and staff and many great program teams of volunteers. We have left to ourselves this work: 50-Year Sermon ................... 6 To set the vision for the UUMA. 25-Year Sermon .................. 10 To monitor the UUMA’s progress towards achieving its Berry Street Essay .............. 13 vision. Obituaries ........................... 25 To stay in touch with and listen to our members. UUMA CENTER News ...... 46 To keep learning more about being a great Board. To be collaborative leaders and trustworthy stewards of Endowment Honorees ...... 50 our resources (people, money, history). To keep ourselves accountable to do our work well. Reviewing the year 2015, there’s a lot of ground we covered. Among the many things we accomplished, a few highlights season to season included: Winter: Participating at the Institute in Asilomar Collegial conversation around our “Big Question” about what we need to be thinking of as we frame new Visions. Connecting with Stewardship “Ambassadors.” March: Attending 50th anniversary events in Selma and Birmingham. Learning from Beth Zemsky, helping us see more clearly how to do all our work incorporating learnings of inter-cultural competency. Accomplished a major self-evaluation of how we the Board are functioning. Spring: Led (listened and recorded) 19 conversations with Chapters, around our “Big Question.” June: Ministry Days. Guidelines Committee introduced questions for our chapters to consider about best practices in using social media observing professional guidelines. Year two of the intentional effort to make our Ministry Days more family-friendly and the first year to include the child dedication of PKs in the opening worship. Vespers in collaboration with LREDA. Page 2 UUMA AnnualUUMA Review Annual Review Year of 2015 From the UUMA Board of Trustees Celebration of first year launch of stewardship campaign for UUMA Endowment. Said Goodbye to Duane Fickeisen, welcomed new secretary Kelly Weisman Asprooth- Jackson, and our President-designate, Cheryl M. Walker. Fall: Continuing ed on governance, what “generative thinking” really means. Explored our learnings from the spring conversations with chapters, initiating deep generative conversations about the work to re-craft our vision statements. CARM (the Board’s Committee on Anti-Racism and Multiculturalism) hosted a convocation for the essays and responses on a new book being published – reflections by ministers of color about their experiences in leadership. Looking ahead to 2016: Your Board will be... Working on new visions statement to help guide our Executive Director in developing an updated strategic plan (informed by what we heard from our colleagues in the Listening Campaign). Creating a truly memorable and rewarding Ministry Days June 2016 in Columbus, Ohio. Stay tuned for details to come! The members of your Board of Trustees are deeply grateful to each of you for your ministry, and for giving us this opportunity to serve such wonderful folks committed to such a great mission. Linda Olson-Peebles Jennifer Ryu Olivia Holmes Kelly W. Asprooth-Jackson President Vice President Treasurer Secretary Fritz Hudson Patricia Hart Josh Pawelek Don Southworth Good Offices Member At-Large ARAOM Executive Director Page 3 UUMA Annual Review Year of 2015 From the UUMA Staff I am in awe and appreciation for those who have the commitment and creativity to send out an annual holiday letter with updated pictures of the family and a review of the year. It’s been years, (decades?), since our family has sent out Christmas cards, let alone an annual newsletter. Maybe that’s why I dread our annual UUMA newsletter looking back at the year that was and looking forward to the year ahead. But then I read last year’s and start writing this year’s and my dread turns into gratitude for the honor it is to lead this organization and highlight what’s happened and what we hope will happen next. All thanks for this practice go to Janette, who not only knows how important it is for our members to have a written record of the 25/50 sermons and Berry Street Essay but also is thinking of those who will come long after I’m gone and who might want to know what we did in the olden days of 2015. Below are some of our highlights of 2015 and some of our dreams for 2016. For those who read these words many years from now, we hope we have left you a UUMA that is a vital resource and partner in your ministry. For those who read them in 2016, thank you for the commitment you bring to your ministry, your life and the UUMA. We on the staff feel privileged for the chance to serve you. In 2015 the UUMA continued to grow stronger and expand our offerings and our reach. We doubled the size of our staff in 2015 adding our first intern, Emily DeTar and our first Endowment Director, Sarah Moldenhauer-Salazar. We said goodbye to Allison Palm and said hello to Andrew Mertz, our Program Assistant, and we added the Acting Office Assistant role to Lucas Southworth’s responsibilities. We had the largest and most successful Institute for Excellence in Ministry at Asilomar in early February and live-streamed one of the sessions for the first time. Our CENTER team has begun plans for expanding the next Institute, in 2018, to clergy beyond the UUMA. The Sustaining the Call campaign, due to Sarah’s leadership, grew from $100,000 in pledges at the beginning of the year to over $650,000 at the end of the year. Almost 30% of our membership has participated. We began our second Beyond the Call program on entrepreneurial ministry in partnership with the UUA, and invited rabbis and clergy from the United Church of Christ to join us. The two-year program is a partnership with business schools from around the country and has been a catalyst for other spiritual/religious innovation programs and partnerships. UUMA Connect, our online resource for skill building and connecting between members, continued to grow by adding ministry meditations, wiki content pages, a “zoom” room for video conferences, and a tagging system to make it easier to find information. We successfully changed our membership year to match our fiscal year and voted to have off-site voting for members at our annual meeting. We completed a successful financial review and continued to strengthen our financial health. Page 4 UUMA AnnualUUMA Review Annual Review Year of 2015 From the UUMA Staff Over 40 people participated in our coaching program which offers one-on-one peer coaching to members who desire it. We continued to offer mentor training to improve our skills in mentoring those newer to ministry. Looking ahead to 2016 we are planning to keep growing and evolving: Begin our third UUMA-wide conversation on Where Leads Our Call? Expand the reach of our Sustaining the Call endowment campaign by reaching out to the larger Unitarian Universalist world including congregations and key leaders. We are partnering with other professional organizations (LREDA, UUMN, AUA) and the UUA in creating new training resources to nurture shared excellence in ministry. Publish, in partnership with Skinner, a book on the experiences of some of our ministers of color in serving predominantly white institutions The new Collegial Development Team (CDT) will begin implementing their strategic plan on how we can strengthen our collegial connections, especially for those who are challenged to take part in our chapter structure. We will be designing and coordinating a process, in partnership with the UUA, for offering collegial connection, discernment support, and training for those training for our ministry from aspirant to preliminary fellowship status. The UUMA is larger and stronger than it ever has been as we enter 2016. We on staff will continue to do what we can to nurture the health of the UUMA so the UUMA can do all it can to nurture its members and excellence in ministry. Don Southworth Janette Lallier Andrew Mertz Sarah Moldenhauer- Emily DeTar Salazar Page 5 UUMA Annual Review Year of 2015 50-Year Sermon Musings of a Dinosaur Rev. Dave Weissbard When I received the invitation to vote for a representative of those Ordained in 1965, I perused the list of survivors and put it away. When Janette called to say she had not received my vote, I told her, considering the distinction with which each of the ministers on the list had served our churches and Association over the last five decades in so many different ways, I was unwilling to make a choice among them, and declined to vote. I was shocked to learn subsequently that I had been chosen. It has occurred to me that perhaps all my colleagues made the same choice as I did and someone in Boston rolled the dice. However achieved, it is indeed an honor to be in this role. I hasten to add that I do not speak for my colleagues, merely as one of them. They cannot be held responsible for what I shall say. James Madison Barr was minister of the Albany church during my formative years. Jim was conservative in many ways and we often disagreed with his sermons, but we loved and respected Jim – in his preaching he got us to examine many of our assumptions.